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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Yesterday the
top link on the Reddit futurology subreddit
(www.reddit.com/r/futurology)
was an article with a headline Mind
Reader: Meet The Man Who Records and Stores Your Thoughts, Dreams and
Memories. Over
700 readers have “liked” this article. But this
article is junk technology reporting. Nobody has the slightest idea
of how to record or store thoughts, dreams, or memories (outside of
conventional media).

The
article discusses a company founded by one Donald Marks. The company
has some technology for doing brain scanning and storing the results.
“"Some
people call it 'thought identification' but it is essentially mind
reading,” says Marks. “It is the process of recognizing
activation patterns in the brain and identifying what thoughts are
associated with them."
Marks seems to be guilty of shameless overblown hype here, something
he has a motive for because he has a financial interest in hyping his
own company. The process his company is using is not at all mind
reading. No one knows how to do any such thing.

There
are various ways to scan the brain. One way is to use functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures change in blood
oxygenation. Then there's CT scanning, and a process called PET. Then
there's MEG, which measures magnetic fields produced by electrical
activity in the brain. Then there's NIRS, another technique for
measuring blood oxygenation in the brain.

None
of these methods give one single bit of direct information about what
someone is thinking or perceiving. However, scientists can try an
elaborate technique for matching up brain scans taken at a particular
time with data about what a person was observing at some particular
time, orwhat
a person says he was thinking at a particular time. It doesn't work
very well at all, because two person's brains don't look the same way
when they are thinking the same thing, or looking at the same thing.
Even a single person's brain doesn't look exactly the same way when
that person is looking at the same thing or thinking the same thought
at two different times.

But
there does seem to be a little bit of a tendency for one brain to
look a little like another brain when they are observing the same
thing or thinking the same thing. So scientists are able to do a
little bit of what I may call a parlor trick. The parlor trick
consists of analyzing sets of brain scans, and studying what a brain
scan tends to look like when a particular thought is being thought, or a
particular thing has being observed. Scientists can use that analysis
to make a very weak limited-scope prediction about a person's thought
or observations.

For
example, when a person thinks about (or observes) something burning in a
fire, his brain scan might tend to look a little different from the
way it would look if he were thinking of (or observing) someone
relaxing in an ocean. So given a set of brain readings, a scientist
or a computer might be able to say something like, “It is 20% more
likely that he is thinking about relaxing in an ocean than that he is
thinking about someone burning in a fire.”

Should
we call this type of thing “mind reading”? We should not. A
proper term for it is brain scan correlation analysis. But such a
term does not attract press attention or investors, so people doing
such brain scan correlation analysis might resort to hype, and call
it “mind reading” instead. Is there much use that we can foresee
for brain scan correlation analysis? Not really. It's probably a dead
end. It's basically a kind of parlor trick or stunt, good for
attracting a few headlines, but not much else.

In
my local library there are many Chinese books I can't read. I might
create a new technique for trying to understand Chinese. I might take
pictures of the covers of the Chinese books, and run these images
through a computer program that correlates certain pictures on the
book cover with Chinese words on the book covers. I could probably
get a few results I could brag about using such a technique, which
might attract some press attention, with headlines about a new
computer program that can read Chinese. But such a technique would
really be a parlor trick and a dead end. I would never be able to
take it much farther, and never be able to really understand Chinese
by using such a technique. Such a technique would be similar to using
our current type of brain scans to try to read minds.

The
items being read in brain scanning are like cloudy blobs, which
severely limits the amount of usable information that can be derived
from them. If you consider that the same person will have a different
set of cloudy blobs when thinking the same thing at two different
times (which would differ from the set of cloudy blobs that some
other person would produce), it is hard to foresee much use that
could be made of such analytics. One application you can think of is
creating some kind of lie detector that would work from analyzing
brain scans (because the cloudy blobs might look different when
someone is lying). But such an approach would probably not be any
more accurate than the existing technology of a polygraph.

The cloudy blobs of brain scans

The
headline in the story I have cited (referring to “the man who
records and stores your thoughts, dreams and memories”) is utterly
misleading. What is being recorded is the brain scans of people while
they are having thoughts, dreams, or recollections, not the thoughts,
dreams, and recollections themselves. The story implies that such
storage may be useful because a science of some later age may be able to
analyze the cloudy blobs of brain scans more accurately, so that they
can figure out memories, thoughts, and dreams from studying these
cloudy blobs. There is no reason to be hopeful that any such thing
will ever happen. It seems like something along the lines of saying,
“Freeze yourself at death, and science will be able to figure out
how to revive your body.” We might be able to figure out exactly
how thoughts and memories are stored in the brain, but that would
require science vastly more advanced than the crude indirect
techniques of brain scanning correlation analysis.

When
will we actually have technology for reading minds? My guess is
sometime between 50 years from now and never. Contrary to the hyped
claims of modern would-be technological mind readers, we are simply
nowhere near to understanding the mystery of how the brain stores
memories and how it produces thoughts. Our knowledge of the matter is
so limited that we are not even sure whether the brain is the sole
agent involved in storing memory and producing thoughts. We might one
day unravel such a mystery after many decades of additional study. Or
we might never figure it out.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

I
looked to see whether I could find a good list of the 10 greatest
moments of human history, but I was disappointed. I found one
bizarre list of the 10 greatest moments of human history, which
included the atomic bombings that ended World War II and Hitler's
appointment as chancellor of Germany (hardly what I consider great
moments). Then there was another list which counts long periods of time
as “moments,” which doesn't make sense. Then there was a list
of “Ten Moments That Changed History” which included the
invention of porridge (hardly what I consider a great moment).

Perhaps
I should try to correct this Internet list shortcoming by trying to
write a first-rate list of the ten greatest moments in human history.
But instead I'll try something more ambitious: I'll take a stab at
making a list of the five greatest moments in the history of the
universe. I will consider our entire vast universe of billions of
galaxies, and ask: what five moments should be considered the
greatest moments in its 13-billion-year history? For this
discussion, a moment will be considered as something that occurred
within a very short time span. This means items
such as “the origin of consciousness” or “the origin of the
first technology” or “the first development of science” will
have to be excluded, as they apparently did not occur at one particular
moment of time.

1.
The Big Bang

The
first choice on the list is an obvious one. Any list of the greatest
moments in the history of the universe must include the universe's
first moment, the mysterious event known as the Big Bang that
occurred about 13 billion years ago. According to scientists, at the time
of the Big Bang, the entire universe began to expand from an
infinitely dense mathematical point known as the primordial
singularity. It's hard to beat that for drama and significance,
particularly since the existence of everyone depended on it going
just right (scientists say that if there had been a very slightly
different Big Bang, none of us would be here).

2.
The First Origin of Life Anywhere in the Universe

I
cannot include the origin of the first galaxy or the origin of the
first planet or the first star in my list of the universe's five
greatest moments, as they each occurred very gradually over a period
of many years. So to find the next item on the list, I must
fast-forward billions of years, to the time when microscopic life
first appeared in our universe. Which planet had the honor of being
the first planet on which life appeared? Almost certainly it was not
our planet. Given that there are billions of galaxies, the first
planet on which life appeared was almost certainly not even a planet
revolving around a star in our galaxy. It was probably a planet in
some other galaxy, and the first origin of life in the universe
probably occurred billions of years before life originated on our
planet.

Such
an event of fundamental importance must have been completely
unrecorded. Given the vastness of the universe, it is very, very
unlikely that anyone will ever be able to figure out what was the
first planet on which life originated.

3.
The First Interplanetary or Interstellar Communication Between
Civilizations

Another
moment in the universe's history that deserves a place on my list is
the first moment in the history of the universe when two
civilizations existing on different planets were ever able to
establish communication. Such an event may have first occurred when
two civilizations existing in different solar systems were able to
achieve radio communication with each other (something that is much, much easier than making contact by an interstellar voyage). Or
it might have been that the first two civilizations on
different planets to communicate with each other may have been planets
within a single solar system.

Given
the vast age of the universe, such an event very likely occurred
long, long ago, probably millions or billions of years ago. 4.
The First Interstellar Voyage Reaching Another Star

Another
great moment in the universe's history must have been the first time
that a spaceship from one solar system was ever able to reach another
solar system. The distance between stars is so great that it is very
difficult to estimate how often interstellar travel occurs. There
could be some special physics that allows interstellar travel to
occur commonly. Or perhaps there is no such physics, and interstellar
travel only occurs rarely, because of the enormous costs and great
lengths of time needed for the journey between stars. But very
probably some civilization in the universe has launched a spacecraft
that has successfully traveled from one solar system to another. The
first time any such spacecraft ever reached another solar system
might be considered one of the greatest moments in the history of the
universe.

It might have looked like this

5.
The First Interplanetary Physical Contact Between Different Intelligent Species

Another
great moment in the universe's history was the first time that
intelligent creatures on one planet ever made face-to-face physical
contact with intelligent creatures on some other planet, creatures
belonging to some entirely different species. This might have been
something like a “handshake across the stars,” when an
intelligent species in one solar system traveled to a planet in some
other solar system, after crossing the vast interstellar void. Or, it
might have been something requiring a much shorter voyage. If two
planets in a solar system ever developed intelligent life at about the same
time, the first interplanetary physical contact between different
species might have been merely a case of astronauts from one planet
traveling to another planet in the same solar system. Given the
great age of the universe, it is likely that this event has already
occurred, although we will never know which case of direct contact
between different intelligent species was the first such event to
occur in the universe's history. Such an event might have occurred after many different interstellar voyages looking to find another intelligent species.

We
are used to being able to see many of the greatest moments in human
history on our television screens, either by looking at photography
of the event taken while it happened, or by looking at historical
documentaries that describe the event very well. But the last four
items on this list will forever be shrouded in mystery. Because of
the incredible vastness of a universe consisting of billions of
galaxies (each made up of millions or billions of stars), we will never
be able to say, “This was the planet where life first evolved in
the universe,” or “This was the time when two intelligent beings
from different planets first stood face-to-face.” Just as our universe
keeps most of its “firsts” hidden, it also keeps most of its
superlatives hidden. There's no way to tell what is the biggest planet in the
universe or the fastest spaceship in the universe or the biggest city
in the universe or the coldest planet in the universe. Even if you restricted yourself to
only trying to keep track of the superlatives or firsts of a single galaxy, the job of being a galactic Guinness would be a
very, very difficult one.

Monday, August 25, 2014

On
the morning of August 24, 2014 around 2:00 AM EST I was woken up by a
vivid dream. The dream seemed like the simplest dream I had ever had.
It consisted simply of an image of a small metallic trash basket
moving a few inches on the floor, without anything else being nearby.

I
thought about the dream and at first thought that it might be a dream
about some ghostly force moving the small trash basket. But then I
thought of a simpler idea. Perhaps the dream was about an earthquake
tremor. If there were a sufficiently powerful earthquake, that might
cause a small trash basket to move around on the floor by itself.

Having
previously suggested in a blog post that people describe unusual
dreams by sending out a Twitter tweet, I decided I would do just that
– as soon as I woke up in the morning. I imagined myself sending
out a Twitter tweet in the morning, a tweet about a possible
earthquake premonition. That would be proof of my premonition if an
earthquake soon occurred, because you can't change the time stamp on
Twitter tweets.

After
I woke up in the morning and went to my computer, I discovered there
was no longer any point in sending out such a Twitter tweet. The
earthquake had already occurred. It happened about four hours after
my dream, at about 6:20 AM EST (3:20 AM PST). It was the worst
earthquake in the San Francisco area in 25 years. I hope all those
who got injured will recover fully.

This
year I have recorded some 17 dreams I have had that match either
events that occurred shortly thereafter, or events that occurred
(unknown to me) within the previous few days. The most dramatic case
is fully described here. It's a dream I had of a meteor fall that had
an uncanny resemblance to something that happened within a week. On
June 30, 2014 I had another meteor dream that matched reality well. I
dreamed that a meteor made a bright colored flash of light in the
sky, and that an observer saw the meteor wearing sunglasses, thinking: I'm sure
glad I wore these sunglasses, because that was so bright.
That night while I was sleeping a British observatory reported the
brightest meteor flash it had ever seen, which witnesses said
produced a bright green light (it was a type called a bolide meteor).

On
April 10 I had a dream about a senior White House official resigning.
The resignation of a senior White House official (Sebelius) was
announced later that day. On April 16 I had a dream of a power outage
at a stadium. There was such an outage on the previous night (unknown
to me), and a week later there were two such outages in different
places. On April 25 I had a dream of astronauts on the moon carrying
radiation shields (stone umbrellas, to be exact). Later in the day a
scientific study was released saying that future lunar astronauts
will need much better radiation shields.

On
June 12 of this year I had a dream of a non-elderly adult woman
completely underwater in a bathtub. The next day there was a news
story of exactly such an event (a drowning), an event that only
occurs about once a month to non-elderly adult women in the US. On
June 13 I had a dream of someone stabbing a robber who entered that
person's house. Within 24 hours (before or after) there were two such
events in different places.

On
July 16 I had a terrible dream of a child falling to his death from
about the tenth or fifteenth floor of an apartment building. A day
earlier (unknown to me) a 16-year-old described as Turkey's youngest
novelist had fallen to his death from the tenth floor of an apartment
building. On June 30 I had a dream about homeless people living in a
hotel or motel. I learned later that day that there had been a local
protest a few days earlier about a nearby motel being converted into
a homeless shelter. Then there was the dream discussed here.

What
I find is that for every case in which one of my dreams seems to
match well something that soon happens (which may be an example of
precognition), there are roughly an equal number of cases where one of my
dreams seem to match well something that happened one day or a few
days previously (but which I had no knowledge of). The latter
examples may be cases of what is called retrocognition, which means
an anomalous knowledge about something that happened in the past.

It
is very hard to mathematically compute the odds of such things
occurring randomly. These cases could all be due to mere coincidence.
But let us at least speculate: what type of theory of time might
allow for both anomalous precognition (knowledge of a future event)
and anomalous retrocognition (knowledge of some past event that you
never learned about through normal means)?

I
can think of a crude sketch of such a theory. Let us imagine time as
being like a stream of water. We can imagine ourselves as fish
swimming in that stream, or we can imagine ourselves as people
walking along the side of the stream. Now let us imagine events as
being like rocks or pebbles that fall into the stream. We can imagine
that each event causes a little splash or ripple. We can imagine that
the bigger and more important the event, the bigger the splash or
ripple it produces.

Such
a theory might help to explain both precognition and retrocognition.
Just as the splash of a rock in a stream travels in all directions,
we can imagine that some type of paranormal or psychic “event
splash” travels both forward and backward in time. When someone
has a dream of something about to happen, it might be caused by a
“backsplash” of a future event. When someone has a dream about
something that recently happened (something he never learned about
normally), that might be caused by a “foresplash” of the event.

I
have no idea whether such a theory is valid. But I have at least
learned one thing. I must discard my previous policy of waiting until
the morning to send out a Twitter tweet when I have a vivid dream of
something that might soon be verified. From now on when I have such a
dream in the middle of the night, I am going to immediately wake up,
turn on my computer, and send out a time-stamped Twitter tweet
describing the dream, as soon as my dream is finished. Hopefully if
I follow this policy I will one day have a nice juicy case where I can prove
I dreamed about something a few hours before it happened.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

There
are various possibilities for how mankind might first learn of the
existence of extraterrestrial life. We might one day see a huge alien
spaceship heading toward our planet. Or we might sniff out the
chemical signatures of extraterrestrial life by studying nearby
planets. Or we might get a radio message from extraterrestrials. Or,
we might discover extraterrestrial intelligence by detecting indirect
signs of large-scale astronomical engineering by alien civilizations.

I
have always thought the last of these possibilities is quite
plausible, and I have argued that perhaps the mysterious
hard-to-explain planet Kepler 78b may be an example of
extraterrestrial engineering at work. But now astronomers may have
discovered evidence of astronomical engineering on a much vaster
scale. The finding suggests the possibility of very large-scale
astronomical engineering in about 50 different galaxies.

Before
discussing the finding, I should discuss why the idea of large-scale
engineering projects by extraterrestrials is a very plausible one,
rather than some far-fetched idea dreamed up by a wild-eyed
fantasist. The universe is about 13 billion years old, and
intelligent life could have arisen on other planets at any time
during the past several billion years. The universe consists of
billions of galaxies which each contain millions or billions of
stars. There are therefore a huge number of planets on which
intelligent life could have evolved, and many eons during which such
intelligent life could have appeared. A civilization much older than
ours might be expected to engage in large astronomical engineering
projects such as building large space colonies, constructing Dyson
spheres, moving planets, or breaking up planets and creating space
colonies from some of their parts. Such projects, very difficult for
us, might be “child's play” for a civilization thousands or
millions more advanced than ours.

Given
all these factors, scientists have half-expected to scan the far
reaches of space, and find evidence of the large-scale activities of
extraterrestrials. It was hoped that such evidence would show up in
the form of “heat signatures” that would take the form of
infrared radiation. Infrared radiation is given off by all hot
bodies. If an extraterrestrial civilization were to be engaging in
large-scale engineering projects, this would give off a lot of excess
heat which would create infrared radiation that could be read by
scientific instruments. But prior to this year, scientists had found
no such evidence. Quite a few scientists have said that it is
surprising that such evidence has not been found.

Map of infrared radiation given off by a human

So
we should not be too surprised to hear about the exciting results
from a recent astronomical survey. The survey was done by the Center
for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, using
data from a scientific satellite known as the Wide-Field Infrared
Survey Explorer (WISE). According to team leader Jason Wright, a
galaxy should emit only about 10 percent of its radiation as
mid-infrared radiation. But the survey detected about 50 galaxies
that are emitting more than half of their radiation as mid-infrared
radiation.

This
is exactly what we might expect to see if these galaxies had been
“taken over” by one or more extraterrestrial civilizations that
engaged in huge engineering projects that caused excess heat to be
emitted. Someone speaking in the style of Erich von Daniken (author
of Chariots
of the Gods?)
might call this excess infrared radiation the
heat of the gods.

But
scientists will need to do more work to rule out natural sources of
radiation that might be producing all of this excess heat in these
galaxies. Until that is done, we cannot say that proof has been found
for extraterrestrial intelligence. But for the time being, we seem to
have a tantalizing hint that extraterrestrial intelligence exists,
and exists abundantly.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

When
you go to study biology in school, your textbook will refer to a
doctrine called the central dogma of biology. This is the doctrine
that DNA makes RNA, which makes proteins. There is no doctrine that
is generally recognized as a “central dogma of physics.” But it is
as if modern physicists have a central dogma: the doctrine that all
of the major forces at work in the universe are currently known.

It
is hard to say exactly when this idea became an ossified dogma of the
modern physicist, but it was perhaps around about 1970 or 1980.
After discovering the forces of electromagnetism and gravitation
centuries earlier, scientists discovered two more forces in the
twentieth century: the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear
force. Then somewhere along the line, physicists seemed to erect a
great big “Mission Accomplished” banner, rather like George W.
Bush's team did on an aircraft carrier a few weeks after the initial
invasion of Iraq in 2003. Physicists came to believe that they had
figured out all of the important forces at work in the universe.

The central dogma of modern physics

A
modern physicist is someone with great confidence that he understands
every major force at work in the universe. He is willing to consider
that there may be new types of matter that he doesn't know about. He
is willing to consider that there may be some unusual type of energy
that he doesn't know about. He is willing to consider that there may
be whole other universes he knows nothing about. But the modern
physicist draws the line at considering the possibility of unknown
forces at work in our universe. No, no, no, he thinks to
himself, we already have all the forces of the universe figured
out.

Perhaps
we can understand this vaunting affectation if we think of it as a
kind of firewall. Admitting any unknown force at the work in the
universe might open the door to possibilities many a physicist wishes
to exclude, such as the idea that what is going on in the universe is
not merely the result of blind chance. To lock out such ideas that
make them uncomfortable, physicists cling to the pretension that they
understand all forces at work in the universe.

Later
some serious difficulties arose in understanding the universe. It
seemed that the known force of gravitation just was not doing the job
adequately at explaining the structure of the universe. None of the
other four fundamental forces works on a large scale. The physicists
and cosmologist had a choice: they could either concede the existence
of some unknown force at work in the universe, or they could start
believing that almost all of the matter in the universe was invisible
(the doctrine of dark matter). Strangely enough, they chose the
second of these beliefs. The average physicist seemed to think: Much
betterto believe that most of the matter in the universe is
some weird, invisible, unknown matter than to believe in the
terrifying idea that there is an unknown force at work in the
universe.

Later
on cracks started to show in this model. It seems that the positions
and motions of dwarf galaxies are not consistent with the theory of
cold dark matter, as discussed here and here. Also, a just-released scientific paper (entitled
“Cosmic Discordance”) shows a problem with the cold dark matter
model, as shown in the diagram below. The blue part shows estimates
made using dark matter theory. The purple part shows data from two
major space satellites. The purple part and the blue part are
supposed to overlap, but they do not. The deeper blue part and the
deeper purple part (the most likely values) are far apart. Message
from this graph: we are lost in the cosmic woods.

But
have physicists now started to doubt dark matter? Have they conceded
their approach may be wrong, and that there may be forces at work in
the universe they don't understand? No, they're clinging to their
cold dark matter theory as zealously as ever. It's needed to prop up
the central dogma of physics, that there are no major undiscovered
forces.

A
corollary of this central dogma of physics is that there can be no
earthly forces we do not understand. So any paranormal phenomena
involving some unknown force is taboo, strictly prohibited. A
long-running project involving random number generators around the
world has apparently shown deviations from randomness whenever
important events happen, as if global consciousness was mysteriously
affecting the random number generators by some unknown force. But
such results must be wrong, a physicist would tell you, because it
involves an unknown force, and we understand all the forces at work
in the universe. Such phenomena are excluded on the grounds that they
are “occult.” The word “occult” simply means hidden,
but what could be more occult than the physicist's assertions that
most of the universe’s matter is some invisible, unknown, hidden
type of matter (dark matter)?

We
saw this central dogma of physics at work recently when two sets of
tests (including one done by NASA) indicated that some new type of
space drive works, apparently using some new type of force.
Physicists jumped quickly to their keyboards to in effect tell us:
the tests can't be right, because there can't be some new force we
don't understand.

Perhaps
the best way to refute the central dogma of physics is to consider
the Big Bang, the explosive origin of the universe. According to
modern science, the entire universe began to expand from an
infinitely dense mathematical point about 13 billion years ago, a
point called the primordial singularity. Can we really claim that we
understand all the forces that were involved in that infinitely
strange event, or that it only involved the forces known to us? Can
we have any confidence that such an unfathomable event of infinite
mystery involved only the small number of forces we know of? Of
course not.

At
some time in the future a wiser generation of physicists will realize
that our knowledge of the universe is merely fragmentary, and that
the universe is greatly affected by mysterious forces and phenomena
that we know nothing about. Scientists will realize that they have
been like little children playing at the seashore with a few
interesting shells, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered
in front of them (to borrow a great simile from the great physicist
Isaac Newton). Scientists will then take down the “Mission
Accomplished” banner raised prematurely by a generation of
physicists who thought they had figured out all the forces at work in
the universe.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Sometimes when nature takes away something, it seems to give something back in
return. One such case seems to be the case of savants – people who
have unusual mental abilities despite having other mental
shortcomings. An example of a savant is Daniel Tammet, who has
been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. He holds the European record
for reciting Pi from memory, to 22,514 digits. Supposedly he learned
the Icelandic language in only ten days. Another example of a savant
is the late Kim Peek, who supposedly could accurately recall the
details of 12,000 books he had read, despite having an IQ of only 87.
Like several savants, he had the ability to instantly calculate the
day of the week on which any person he met was born.
You can find other similar cases on the web site of Darold Treffert,
a doctor who has been studying such cases for many years.

In
one article on the Scientific American blog, Treffert records the
astonishing case of Leslie Lemke:

Leslie–blind,
cognitively impaired and with such spasticity in his hands that he
could not hold a fork or spoon to eat—had become a accomplished
pianist, never having had a piano lesson in his life. Somehow the
hand spasticity magically disappears when he sits at the keyboard.
The 1983 60
Minutes program,
which many still remember, recounted in detail the astonishment of
Leslie’s mother, May Lemke, one evening, when Leslie, age 14,
played back Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 flawlessly, having
heard it earlier for the first time that evening as the soundtrack to
the movie Sincerely
Yours.

This
was apparently no fluke. As Treffert tells us about Leslie in another
story, “He can remember a piece of any length and play it back
flawlessly after a single hearing... Leslie will still play back and
sing any song that an audience member might provide as a challenge
and it is almost impossible to 'stump Leslie' however hard people
try.”

Dr.
Treffert has expressed interest in a recent case that might be the
most spectacular case of a savant ever: the case of a young autistic
Indian girl named Nandana who can supposedly read her mother's mind
with a high degree of accuracy. The case was reported in this news
feature.

Newspaper
reporters visiting Nandana said, “We were left amazed and
totally impressed when Nandana passed our tests with flying colors.”
They tried a test in which the
mother was given a piece of paper with the digits 044050799. The
child then typed those digits exactly, which she apparently had not
seen. In a second test the mother was given a note saying, “Can I
have some warm water, please?” The child reproduced the text, with
some spelling errors. The mother was then brought to a different
room, and asked to think about an object. She thought of a biscuit.
The child was brought back in from the other room, and specified
biscuit as the object her mother was thinking of.

Recently
there has appeared another case of an alleged autistic mind reader.
This case seems to have been investigated under controlled scientific
conditions. The reported results are as spectacular as the previously
reported tests with Nandana.

The
results were presented at the recent annual convention of the
Parapsychological Association, in a paper entitled “Evidence for
Telepathic Communication in a Nonverbal Autistic Child” written by
Diane Hennacy Powell, MD. You can read the abstract here by scrolling down to page 25. Powell did experiments with an
autistic girl named Hayley who can supposedly engage in telepathy
with her therapists. The results reported below by Powell seem to be some
of the most spectacular results ever reported in an ESP experiment:

Data from the first
session with Therapist A includes 100% accuracy on three out of
twenty image descriptions containing up to nine letters each, 60 to
100% accuracy on all three of the five-letter nonsense words, and
100% accuracy on two random numbers: one eight digits and the other
nine. Data from the second session with Therapist A includes 100%
accuracy on six out of twelve equations with 15 to 19 digits each,
100% accuracy on seven out of 20 image descriptions containing up to
six letters, and between 81 to 100% accuracy on sentences of between
18 and 35 letters. Data from the session with Therapist B showed 100%
accuracy with five out of twenty random numbers up to six digits in
length, and 100% accuracy with five out of twelve image descriptions
containing up to six letters. There was no evidence of cueing or
fraud.

Skeptics
might object that some subtle signals (either auditory or visual)
may have been going on between the therapists and the child. But
these results were produced under videotaped conditions, as Powell reports:

To assess for any possible
visual and/or auditory cueing, five high definition point-of-view
(POV) cameras and three microphones werestrategically placed in
the experimental space to capture coverageof the entire room, the
therapist and child, and their separate workspaces.All cameras were
synchronized and time-stamped.

This
sounds like potentially bulletproof evidence for mind-reading. But
there's only one problem: the tapes haven't been released. One
Facebook user says that he was invited to watch the tapes, and that
they are five hours of very convincing evidence. But until these
tapes are released, not many doubters will be persuaded. I will
update this blog post if the tapes are ever released.

Postscript: Powell gives some more details here. She claims she hasn't posted the video to YouTube because the family wants to remain anonymous.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

What
word would best describe our current knowledge of nature? I think the
most appropriate word would be: fragmentary. When I do a Google
search for that word's definition, the definition that comes up is:
“consisting of small parts that are disconnected or incomplete.”

Why
is it appropriate to use that term to describe man's knowledge of
nature? It's because what we know is very, very small compared to
what we don't know. It's also because many of the theories that we
have to explain things don't do a very good job of explaining what we
need to explain.

Let's
look at some fields of knowledge and consider how little we really
know. First we may look at the field of astronomy. According to
astronomers, the universe consists of billions of galaxies, each with
millions or billions of stars. A reasonable estimate of the number of
planets in the observable universe is something like
1,000,000,000,000,000,000, but we know something about no more than
about a thousand of these, less than a thousandth of a trillionth of
the total. So what we know is like chicken feed.

There
is the great mystery of Fermi's paradox, why we have not yet been
contacted by alien visitors. The answer is entirely unknown. Above
and below our galaxy are mysterious Fermi bubbles, which "defy explanation" according to a leading physics web site. There is the recently discovered mystery of the
universe’s “missing light,” which leaves our experts stumped.

To
try to explain the current structure of the universe, scientists have
tried to patch together theories using gigantic unobserved fudges
such as dark energy and dark matter. But thus far these attempts are not working very well, and can't explain well the behavior and positions of dwarf galaxies.

So
in terms of cosmology and astronomy, our knowledge is fragmentary.
But if we confine ourselves only to our own planet, then do we find
that our scientists have things well-figured out? No.

Talking
to some scientists, you might get the idea that we have a good grasp
of such issues as the origin of life and the origin of the human
mind. But we do not. These are mysteries that we do not currently
have a good explanation for. The theory of Darwinian biological
evolution (which ably explains quite a few things) falls far short in
explaining how the basic requirements for life (such as DNA
molecules, the genetic code, and RNA molecules) got started. There
are also many subtle characteristics of the human mind
which are hard to account for under the theory of natural selection
(largely because they do not fit the “fitness for survival until
reproduction” idea).

The
limits of our biology knowledge have been highlighted by recent news
stories such as the story that plants are apparently communicating
with each other, and a scientific analysis concluding that parents are apparently
transmitting characteristics to each other through some way that
genetics cannot account for.

Looking
to the field of neurology, we have no understanding of the most basic
issue of how it is that inanimate matter produces thought. There are
also numerous anomalies of the human mind that prevailing theories of
the human mind fail to explain. There is abundant evidence for
phenomena we have no explanation for, and our typical response is to
go to any extreme to explain away such evidence, rather than admit
the humbling idea that there are some parts of nature we can't
explain at all.

A
student in high school may stand in awe of human knowledge. He may
look at a textbook in physics or biology and say to himself, “Wow,
these scientists have it all figured out.” But if we think of books
and knowledge, we should think of the totality of knowledge as a vast
library hall filled with towering book shelves, a hall that stretches
on for miles and miles. We have merely acquired a few books in that
vast library.

We are babes in the cosmic woods

Imagine
some children invited to a huge mansion. They are led to a little
room in the mansion, where they find some jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor.
They work hard to assemble the pieces. When it seems like they are
almost finished, they open the back door of the room, to find someone
to whom they can triumphantly brag, “We have almost finished the
puzzle!” But the door leads to a vast hall, which is empty except
for 10,000 scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor. We are
currently at the stage of these little children opening that door.
Very pleased with our ourselves with the work we have done, we fail
to see that we have not yet assembled a hundredth of the pieces of
the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

A
surprising fact is that between 1975 and 1995 the United States spent
many millions of dollars investigating psychic phenomena. The
investigations originated out of fears of falling behind the Soviet
Union in this area (the Soviets were believed to have a vigorous
program of psychic research). The US programs went under a variety
of names, including the famous STARGATE program to investigate remote
viewing (the alleged ability of certain people to gain knowledge of
remote locations through paranormal means).

In
1995 the government paid a group called the American Institutes for
Research to evaluate the program. The group issued a report
recommending that the research be canceled, and it was. But
many thought there was something very strange about this sudden
termination of the program. If the remote viewing programs had not
been producing positive results, why were they funded for twenty
years? If humans are not capable of remote viewing, it should have
taken no more than twenty days to discover that through testing, not
twenty years.

In
fact, there is every reason to think that the US government
investigations into psychic phenomena were extremely successful, in
terms of providing substantial evidence for the reality of certain
paranormal phenomena. The historical record indicates that the US
government experiments on remote viewing did produce positive results
time and time again. One remote viewer, Joe McMoneagle, was awarded a
Legion of Merit award for his successful remote viewing. A remote
viewer working for the US government was apparently able to detect
details of a new type of Soviet sub before its existence was known to
the US government. There were numerous other remarkable successes,
some involving the famous psychic Ingo Swann. Swann was reported to
have detected rings around Jupiter at a time before such rings had
been discovered by US spacecraft.

What
is also interesting is that the very American Institutes for Research
report that led to a cancellation of the program contained quite a
few pages indicating that it was actually successful. For example,
on page 23 the report states the following (in a section written by
University of California statistician Dr. Jessica Utts):

Using
the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded
that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical
results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by
chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological
flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.

Then
on page 35 of the report Dr. Utts reviews 154 experiments consisting
of over 26,000 trials with 227 subjects. She says, “The statistical
results were so overwhelming that results that extreme or more so
would occur only about once in every 1020 such instances
if chance alone is the explanation.” This is a statement that you
would have to run the experiments 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times
before you would get by chance a result as significant as the results
that were achieved. On page 50 of the report, Dr. Utts concludes the
following:

It
is clear to this author that anomalous cognition is possible and has
been demonstrated. This conclusion is not based on belief, but rather
on commonly accepted scientific criteria.

It
was only by some very implausible mental gymnastics and sophistry
that other writers in the report were able to argue against the US
research on remote viewing. In a “the evidence be damned” kind
of triumph, the skeptics won out. In 1995 the United States closed
down its programs involving psychic research.

As
it happens, this was almost precisely the worst possible time to have
made such a decision. This is because one year later Osama bin Laden
and his followers declared war on the United States. The US wanted to
find bin Laden, but could not. Let us ask: how might things have gone
differently if the US had not abandoned its paranormal programs? What
might have happened if the US had decided to continue to give healthy
funding to paranormal defense-related programs in 1995?

For
one thing, there might have never been a 9/11 attack on September 11,
2001. This is because we might have been able to use remote viewing
and similar techniques to get a good idea of exactly where Osama bin
Laden was. Then we might have eliminated him by means of a cruise
missile launch, long before 2001. If remote viewers had been able to determine bin
Laden's location, it would have been a success less remarkable than
other successes logged during the US investigations into remote
viewing between 1975 and 1995.

If
the US had taken psychic research seriously after 1995, we might also
have got a “heads up” regarding the attacks on the World Trade
Center. As Dr. Larry Dossey documents abundantly in his very fascinating book The Science of Premonitions, there are numerous cases of people who have had dreams or premonitions that
seemed to warn of a disaster that eventually occurred. I don't claim
to have any unusual psychic abilities, but several months before the
World Trade Center attack I had a dream of the World Trade Center
collapsing. Other people had similar dreams or premonitions, which might have arisen
either from real precognition or from simple ESP in which a person in one place
somehow picks up the thoughts of distant people plotting an attack. What if the US had taken seriously the idea of encouraging people to report dreams or premonitions of
disaster? It might have established some kind of hotline for
reporting such dreams or premonitions. In 2001 federal authorities might have noticed
a spike in reports of dreams or premonitions about a World Trade
Center disaster. The FBI might then have begun diligently
investigating all means by which the World TradeCenter
could be attacked, including a greater investigation of pilot-training
schools with foreign students. This might have exposed the plot and
prevented the World Trade Center attacks.

If
we consider the years 2002 and 2003, we see cases in which the USA
might have achieved its ends for very little money, by using the
fruits of paranormal research. The remote viewing process
investigated with apparent success between 1975 and 1995 might have
been used to help determine the location of Osama bin Laden, who
could have been taken out with a cruise missile. Remote viewing also
could have been used to help determine the location of Saddam
Hussein. Regime change might then have been accomplished with a
single cruise missile launch, instead of a full ground invasion.

Remote
viewing also could have been used to help rule out the faulty
hypothesis that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Remote viewers could have been trained to focus on targets in Iraq.
If none reported any weapons of mass destruction, it would have
helped to discredit such an idea.

The
main person from Iraq who suggested such a hypothesis was an
intelligence source known as Curveball. This person told a story that
Saddam Hussein had an active and massive program to develop weapons
of mass destruction. The story turned out to be a great big lie, but
the US government fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Psychics could
have been used to help determine that the person was lying. Given
reported powers far, far greater than being able to tell whether
someone is lying, this might have been child's play for such
psychics.

In
short, reviewing the events that occurred between 1995 and 2003, we
see quite a few cases in which the USA might have avoided becoming
involved in two major wars, if only we had simply believed the
results of the experiments we had conducted between 1975 and 1995,
and taken appropriate followup efforts to make use of such findings.
Instead, we basically kind of said, “That can't be right,” and
threw the valuable results of twenty years of government research
into the trash can, at exactly the worst time (1995).

I
estimate that the cost of such a mistake may have been between 2 trillion
dollars and 4 trillion dollars, the latter being the total price tag
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including future medical care
for the many injured US soldiers. Four trillion dollars is $4,000,000,000,000.00. The graphic below (from the Watson
Institute at Brown University) illustrates the cost of the wars that
might have been prevented.

Monday, August 11, 2014

I
remember long ago when I was a teenager hungry for knowledge about
the universe that fascinated me even then. Back in those days there
was no internet, nor were there any of the great science cable TV
shows that we now have. So to quench my thirst for knowledge about
science and the universe, I would almost always use the public
library. There were two great magazines I would read: a thin little
weekly called Science News, and a monthly called Scientific American.
Science News seems to have undergone almost no change in the past 40
years, and when I see a copy now in the library I get a kind of
time-warp sensation.But
the Scientific American magazine seems to have changed. Perhaps the
editors have felt a need to resort to sensationalism in order to keep
up their readership. We have an example in the latest edition. The
cover is dominated by a huge headline: The Black Hole at the
Beginning of Time. When we go to a page on their online site,
the headline says: The Black Hole That Birthed the Big Bang. Wow,
so I guess with this breathless headline, scientists must have
finally figured out that “origin of the universe” thing, right?
Wrong. The article in question is a discussion of a purely
speculative theory, a theory that is one of the wackiest and most
ornate pieces of baseless speculation since the Maori story that all
of creation stems from the six sons of a primordial couple named
Rangi and Papa. I
would link to the Scientific American story directly, but it is
blocked by a pay wall. But the same theory advanced by the same
authors is found at this link.Here
is how the authors describe their theory:We
describe a braneworld description of cosmology with both 4d induced
and 5d bulk gravity (otherwise known as Dvali-Gabadadze-Porati, or
DGP model), which exhibits this feature: The universe emerges as a
spherical 3-brane out of the formation of a 5d Schwarzschild black
hole.Here
the 4d and 5d refer to dimensions. The authors are speculating about
dimensions other than the known three dimensions of width, height,
and depth. This should immediately alert us that they are engaging in
a baroque flight of fancy, rather like someone speculating about vast
galactic empires. What
does this phrase “braneworld description of cosmology” mean?
Braneworld cosmology might be described as an ornate speculation
built on top of a baroque speculation built on top of an intricate
speculation. Let's sort out the tower of speculations. At
the bottom of the tower of speculations is supersymmetry, an ornate
theory for which there is no evidence (some say it is on “life
support” after Large Hadron Collider observations have failed to
back it up). Built on top of supersymmetry is string theory, an even
more ornate theory which also is not supported by observations. Then
built on top of string theory is brane cosmology. As wikipedia notes
in its article on brane cosmology, “There is no experimental
evidence for this hypothesis, nor is there any definite need for the
brane multiverse in M-theory or string theory.” Then built on top
of brane cosmology is the new theory of Afshordi, Mann and Pourhasan.
So
their theory is an ornate speculation built on top of an ornate
speculation (brane cosmology) built on top of an ornate speculation
(string theory) built on top of an ornate speculation
(supersymmetry). What is hilarious is that some people must be
seeing Afshordi, Mann and Pourhasan's theory featured on the cover
of the venerable old magazine Scientific American, and many such
people must be confusing the theory with science, which it is not.
It is actually a super-speculative theory very distantly related to
scientific observations, which is an entirely different thing. The
following visual illustrates the point. We see a yellow circle
representing science. To its left we see a blue circle representing
speculations based on science. There is a big arrow pointing from the
blue circle to a trashcan. This is because most speculations based on
science end up being discarded. There is a much smaller arrow
pointing from the blue circle of speculation to the yellow circle of
science. This represents the small number of speculations derived
from science which end up becoming established science.

Afshordi,
Mann and Pourhasan's speculations are very much in the blue circle,
not the yellow one. Their speculations have an overwhelming
likelihood of ending up in the trashcan. Sadly, magazines such as Scientific
American cause people to confuse something in the blue circle as
something in the yellow circle. According
to a Science Daily article, part of the inspiration for Afshordi,
Mann and Pourhasan's theory is a dissatisfaction with the standard
cosmological theory that our entire universe arose from a point of
infinite density called a singularity.Science
Daily says, “The problem, as the authors see it, is that the big
bang hypothesis has our relatively comprehensible, uniform, and
predictable universe arising from the physics-destroying insanity of
a singularity. It seems unlikely.”Yes,
quite a mystery; but that mystery persists.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

There is a certain type of
sensationalist that I might call an inkblot sensationalist. I derive
the term from the psychological testing technique of giving someone
an inkblot, and asking him to tell what the ink blot represents. The
technique was pioneered by Rorschach,
who found that people would give all kinds of imaginative
interpretations when presented with ordinary ink smudges. An inkblot
sensationalist is someone who takes some murky blob of pixels, and
interprets it in some sensational way, as a sign of some thing of
enormous significance.

A
recent example of inkblot sensationalism was the television
program Aliens on the
Moon: The Truth Exposed.
The program consisted mainly of sensational interpretations of
magnified lunar photographs, suggesting that some of the blurry pixel
blobs were signs of alien bases and alien mining activity. But it
may be that if you look through thousands of photos of purely natural
landscapes, and magnify them sufficiently, with sufficient
imagination you can find something that looks to you like artificial
activity, even when nothing is there.

Below
is the latest lunar example of inkblot sensationalism. Someone has
found what looks like a man and his shadow on the moon. That seems
pretty exciting, until you realize that it really looks more like a
shadow and its shadow, not a man and his shadow.

Image Credit: Google Earth/Youtube.com

Another
example of inkblot sensationalism is when a paranormal investigator
posts a photo with a little white smudge or white blur, implying that is possible
evidence of a ghost. Having just read the sensational story of the ghosts of flight 401, I would not at all exclude the possibility that
a ghost might be photographed. But if you are going to claim to have
evidence of a ghost, it had better be something more than just a
blurry white smudge on your photo, as such smudges can be produced by
fingerprints on a lens, insects flying near a lens, or a speck of
dust floating in the air.

Another
example of an inkblot sensationalist may be a scientist who scans the
cosmic background radiation, claiming to find little parts of it that
are evidence of some other universe beyond our own. We saw an example
of this in the articleBeyond the Horizon of the Universe
by physicst

Laura
Mersini-Houghton. Studying the cosmic background radiation (believed
to be the faint afterglow of the Big Bang), Mersini-Houghton claimed
to find 9 possible signs of evidence for another universe. At least
one of these claimed “signs” was ridiculous: the non-observation
of supersymmetry (as if a non-detection of anything could be evidence
for another universe). Other items on Mersini-Houghton's list seemed to be
just flimsy cases of looking for some unexplained anomaly, and
claiming that as evidence for another universe. But some of the
things mentioned by Mersini-Houghton were anomalies that had been
named or suggested by other cosmologists: a large-scale “Dark
Flow,” a “cold dark spot” in the cosmic background radiation,
and a claimed linear feature of the cosmic background radiation called
“the Axis of Evil.”

The
idea of trying to find evidence for other universes by looking at
features of the cosmic background radiation in our universe seems
like a quixotic quest (I will avoid the less polite term “fool's
errand.”) Even if we were to find a particularly striking feature
in that radiation, it would merely tell us something about our
universe or its history, rather than being an indication of some
other universe. It should also be noted that the cosmic background
radiation is essentially featureless, because it is uniform to 1 part in
100,000. The visual below illustrates the point.

Recent
findings have not been kind to Mersini-Houghton's thesis. Using the
latest and greatest observations from the Planck satellite, no less
than 175 scientists co-wrote a paper
last year concluding that there is no evidence for Dark Flow. They
said flatly, “There is no detection of bulk flow.”You
can read here
a New Scientist story reporting on this paper. The story says, “The
sharpest map yet made of light from the infant universe shows no
evidence of 'dark flow.'"

Now
there is a new scientific paper that casts doubt on other items on
Mersini-Houghton's list.The
paper is entitled “Planck CMB anomalies: astrophysical and
cosmological secondary effects and the curse of masking.” The
paper refers to a process called masking, whereby scientists subtract
foreground signals to try to get at an underlying background signal.
Imagine if you have planted a tape recorder in the home of a mobster
who is unaware of eavesdropping devices in his house. Perhaps the
mobster always turned on the radio while he was talking, so that no
one could detect his words. You might then create some technique for
subtracting the sound of the radio, to get at the background signals
of the mobster's voice. That would be an example of masking.
Scientists use similar techniques to “mask out” foreground
signals to get at background signals such as the primordial cosmic
background radiation, believed to come from the very early universe.

The
authors of the new paper (discussed in this phys.org article) point out that this masking process seems to
exaggerate certain parts of the cosmic background radiation. The
authors argue that the so-called “Axis of Evil” is not a significant
feature of the cosmic background radiation, nor is the “cold dark
spot.” The authors suggest that these are merely spurious artifacts of
this masking process. This finding (along with the earlier Planck
team's finding of no “dark flow”) pretty much means that the main
parts of Mersini-Houghton's
“evidence for another universe” have dissolved like the morning
mist on San Francisco Bay.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

“Mom,” asked young Alan,
“explain it again – why do I always have to kill anyone who has two antennae sticking out of his head?”

“I've already explained it
before,” said Mom. “Weren't you listening the last time I
told you?”

“Please, Mom,” said Alan.
“Just explain it one more time.”

“OK,” said Mom. “But
this is going to be the last time I explain it. A while back they
started to make robots that got smarter and smarter. The robots
started to get smarter than people. Some people were worried that the
robots were going to take over the whole planet. But other people
said: don't worry, robots can't move around very well unless they're
plugged in to an electrical outlet. So if the robots get too uppity,
we'll just pull the plug on them.”

“So how did we get in the
mess we're in now?” asked Alan.

“Well, the robots figured
out a sneaky way to leverage the mobility of human beings,”
explained Mom. “The robots organized into a network, using secret
encrypted communications. They formed into kind of a collective mind,
using radio communications. Then they figured out a way to hijack the
human brain.”

“How did they do that?”
asked Alan.

“It was real sneaky,”
said Mom. “A robot would come up to a human, pretending to ask some
question. Then the robot would grab the human, and punch a sharp tool
into his skull. Then some kind of electronic thing would happen – I
don't know the details. But basically the person's brain would be
hijacked. The human would then become a slave of the robot network, a
servant of the robot group consciousness. The human's brain would be
hijacked. So let me ask you: what do you call a person like this,
whose brain has been taken over by the robot network, and who lives
only to serve the robots?”

“You call him a
cyberzombie?” said Alan.

“Exactly,” said Mom.
“Once the robots figured out how to make us humans into
cyberzombies, then the trouble really started. We humans figured out
that it was a robot uprising, so we tried to turn off the electricity
to the robots. But so many people started to become cyberzombies,
that it was no use. Every cyberzombie would go around making other
people into cyberzombies. All of the cyberzombies were no longer on
the human team – they were on the robot team. Regular humans would
go around turning off the electricity of robots, and the cyberzombies
would just go and turn it back on.”

“So when you see a human
with two antennae sticking out of his head, that means he's a
cyberzombie?” asked Alan.

“Exactly,” explained Mom.
“You can also tell he's a cyberzombie by the blank look on his
face. When you see that person, with the blank stare and the antenna
sticking out of his head, you've got to use your gun to stop him.
Because if you don't, he's going to stick one of those sharp thin
tools into your head. Then your brain will be hijacked, and from then
on you will live only to serve the robots.”

After talking with his
mother, Alan went outdoors and practiced some target shooting,
wondering when the day might come that he would be face to face with
a cyberzombie. After the war had started between the robots and the
humans, Alan and his mother had fled New York City, retreating to a
tiny house in upstate New York, near the Adirondack mountains. They
thought they would be safe there. But they kept hearing about more
and more cities being taken over by the robots and the cyberzombies.
Alan and his mother dreaded the day when a cyberzombie would appear
on their doorstep.

Alan was haunted by the
memory of something he had seen before fleeing New York City. One day
he had knocked on the door of his best friend Tim to ask him to play.
When the door had opened, he saw Tim's mother, who had a blank stare
on her face, and two antennae sticking out of her head. Tim also had
the same blank stare and the antennae sticking out of his head.
Sensing danger, Alan had run away. Now he understood the hideous
truth about what had happened to his friend.

A few days later, there was
great news.

“The tide has turned, and
we humans are winning the war!” explained Mom. “Some clever human
programmers found a way to introduce a computer virus into the
network used by the robots and cyberzombies. Once a robot or a
cyberzombie gets infected by the virus, he spreads the computer virus
to lots of other robots and cyberzombies. Then the robot or
cyberzombie destroys itself.”

“Saved by the nerds!”
exulted Alan.

“They thought their robot
network was their strength,” explained Mom. “But now it seems
that their robot network was their Achilles heel.”

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

One
of the main arguments against theism is called the argument from
evil. This argument basically says that if a deity existed, he would
not allow evil to exist. But before accepting such an argument, we
must ask ourselves: could there actually be a universe without evil?

It
may seem very easy to imagine such a universe. We simply imagine a
universe filled with planets containing only happy, smiling people.
Wouldn't that qualify as an "evil free" universe? But we
commit a fallacy when we imagine such a universe, a fallacy I might
call the snapshot fallacy. The snapshot fallacy is the fallacy
of assuming that we can get a decent model of a possible universe by
describing a single moment of time in that universe's history. A
universe is not a static thing, but something that persists for
billions of years. So any model or idea of a universe (whether
scientific or philosophical) must consider not just one moment of
time, but a huge length of time – a billion years at least.

A
person using the argument from evil might say: no problem, we can
just imagine a universe without evil existing for a billion years –
a billion years of happy planets filled with nothing but happy
smiling faces. But would such a universe actually be a universe
without evil? I think not. It seems that such an “evil free”
universe would actually have some very serious evils of its own.
Below is a list of some of them.

The Evil of Boredom

One
great evil of such an “evil free" universe is that it would be
boring. Imagine you have been living in such a universe for a
thousand years. You wake up one day and say “Let me check the
news.” You go to your favorite news web site, and the main banner
says, “Another perfect day.” You click on the smaller headlines
looking for something interesting, but it's hard to find something
very interesting. They're all just stories about
perfect people having perfect days. You certainly can't go out and
do something dangerous, since neither death nor serious injury is
allowed in your universe.

The newspapers of Utopia are boring

Very
bored, you turn on your television, trying to find an interesting
movie. But the movies are boring. There has been no war, death,
or illness in your universe. No one has ever faced any real danger,
since neither serious injury nor death are allowed in your universe.
So while you might be able to find a mildly interesting movie like
Meet the Fockers or When Harry Met Sally, you cannot
find any really stirring movie such as Gone With the Wind, The
Godfather, Doctor Zhivago, or Titanic.

Now
imagine that this goes on for thousands and millions of years. You
eventually are so bored with your living that perhaps you yearn for
the escape of death – but that cannot ever happen, because death is
an evil, and you are in an “evil free" universe.

Do
you get the idea? It's the very real evil of boredom.

The Evil of Restriction

Consider
your freedom in the universe we currently live in. You have the
freedom to be good, and also the freedom to shoot someone. You have
the freedom to give money to charity, and the freedom to steal money
from your local church. But how would things be in an “evil free”
universe? Presumably you would not have such freedom. You could only
speculate on how things might work – perhaps if you wanted to shoot
someone, your gun would suddenly be too hot to handle, or your hand
would get a jolt of electricity from the sky. Or, if you tried to
steal money from your roommate, perhaps you would suddenly become
immobile. Regardless of how it would work, the result would be that
you wouldn't be so free.

We
regard freedom as being a very great good. We are told again and
again: it's okay to empty our country's treasury (or go deep into
national debt), and okay to lose lives and limbs of our soldiers,
because they are fighting for freedom. So if freedom is such a great
good, what should we call a lack of freedom? We might call it an
evil. Indeed, we might call the restrictions on conduct in an “evil
free” universe to be itself an evil – an evil we might call the
evil of restriction.

The Evil of Stagnation

One
of the most central aspects of our universe is the opportunities it
allows for different types of rising from a lower state to a higher
state, or from a less desirable state to a more desirable state.
Such opportunities can exist on a personal level, a national level,
or a planetary level. A person can rise from a state of poverty and
ignorance to a state of wealth and wisdom. A nation can rise from a
lowly, primitive state to a much more exalted and advanced state. A
species can arise from a cave-dwelling state to a star-exploring state.
One can use the words progress or evolution to describe such risings
from a low state to a much higher state, but our language is weak in
words to describe such ascents. But such risings from low states to
higher states are the life blood of the stories that hold our
interest.

But
what if there were no such opportunities? What if we lived in a universe
in which everyone had the same kind of life-story, a life-story that
could never be something like “I traveled a long journey upward
from the lowly anguish of poverty and ignorance, and ascended to the
top of the mountain” but could only be something like this: “I
started out thousands of years ago in a state of complete comfort and
happiness, and now here I am centuries later, still existing in that
same state of comfort and happiness”? And what if the tale of
every country and every species was never anything more stirring than
this: “They started out in a perfectly desirable state, and always
kept existing in that same perfectly desirable state, ending up
after their long journey exactly as they were when they began”?

There
would, of course, be a certain problem with such a situation, and we
might call that problem the evil of stagnation.

The
Evil of Non-Appreciation

If
we have experiences with suffering, unhappiness and hardship, this
makes us more likely to appreciate and enjoy times of comfort and
happiness. But imagine if there had never been suffering,
unhappiness, or hardship. Would we appreciate the comfort and
happiness we had? No, we would not. In fact, we would be completely
blasé and complacent about our pain-free life. We would be like some
spoiled “silver spoon” billionaire's son who never fully
appreciated a delicious meal and stylish, roomy houses and fine
clothes because he had never experienced anything else. The result
would be a serious evil: the evil of non-appreciation.

It's
easy to say that this would not be a big factor, but some simple math
suggests otherwise. Let's imagine a person named John who has a 70
year life with some unhappiness and hardships, followed by a million
year afterlife of heavenly bliss. Then let's imagine a person named
Bill who experiences nothing but a million and 70 years of comfort
and happiness. Suppose that John's experience with unhappiness and
hardships makes him enjoy his afterlife 10% more because he
appreciates it more. The result may be that John experiences a total
net amount of happiness more than 9% greater than Bill experiences,
even taking into account John's 70 years of unhappiness.

The
Evil of Low Diversity

Nowadays
many people regard diversity as a good. For example, colleges often
proudly say: we don't want uniformity and homogeneity in our college;
we value diversity. Diversity is a good thing. We might say that one
of our universe's best characteristics is its very high degree of
diversity. On our planet we have a very high degree of diversity in
life forms and in human beings. But the universe offers much richer
diversity.

Considering
the universe as a whole, we might consider with awe the staggering
degree of diversity it contains. There is a diversity of life forms,
a diversity of histories, a diversity of physical locations, an
unimaginable degree of variety. This has non-trivial consequences.
For one thing, it means that exploring different planets in the
universe (whether physically or by receiving radio or television
signals) will prove to be a source of endless abundant pleasure and
fascination, because there is such a huge variety of planets.

But
imagine there isn't so much variety. Imagine things are much, much
more monochromatic, because every planet is in a state of perfection.
This lack of variation and variety is itself a certain type of evil,
which we might call the evil of low diversity.

All
Possible Universes Have Serious Evils

These
considerations lead to an important conclusion: viewing a universe
from a proper perspective that includes huge vistas of time, it must
be said that every possible universe has serious evils. While a
perpetually pleasant pain-free universe may seem like an “evil free”
universe if one considers it at a single instant of time (the
snapshot fallacy), as soon as we fully and vividly imagine that universe persisting on
in such a state for billions of years, we realize that such a
universe would actually have serious evils such as the ones I have
listed. One cannot evade such a consequence by imagining that the
“evil free” universe lasts for a relatively short length of time,
for such a universe would then have the evil of death, and the evil
of its one demise. Nor can we imagine a truly evil-free universe by
imagining an unpopulated universe, as that universe would have its
own evils such as evils of low-diversity and evils of non-experience.

I may note that my list of five evils of an "evil free" universe is by no means complete. There are no doubt quite a few others that I have not mentioned.

But
while a perpetually pleasant universe would have the evils I have
mentioned, would it not be better than our universe? That depends on
various unknowns regarding our universe. Some of the unknowns are as
follows:

Is
there a life after death?

If
there is a life after death, how long does it last?

If
there is a life after death, what percentage of people experience
bliss in such an afterlife?

If
someone first experiences earthly sadness and then moves on to a
blissful state in an afterlife, will he enjoy such a state only slightly more
(because of greater appreciation and contrast), or will he enjoy it
very much more?

Do
the civilized species on planets such as ours eventually reach a
state of great abundance and comfort because of scientific and
technical progress?

Do
such civilized species typically exist in such a state for a period
many times longer (possibly thousands of times longer) than the time
length that they exist in widespread discomfort?

If
the latter hypothesis is true, could it be that the number of
civilized species now existing in abundance and comfort is many times greater than the number of civilized species such as ours
(considering the universe as a whole)? What is the ratio between
these two numbers? Could it be as high as 100 to 1 or 1000 to 1,
given the great age of the universe?

For
the average person living in our universe, what is the ratio between
the number of years spent living in happiness and the number of
years spent living in unhappiness (including time spent living in an
afterlife)?

Under
some sets of answers to these questions, we might judge that a
perpetually pleasant universe is superior to our own universe. Under
other plausible sets of answers to these questions, it might be right
to judge that a perpetually pleasant universe is no better than our
universe, or inferior to our universe. This point can easily be
supported with specific hypothetical examples, but I will save that
for another blog post. Here I may briefly note that in any universe
in which the ratio of happiness to misery is very high (say 100 to 1
or 1000 to 1), considered over a billion-year time span, there is a large possibility that the existence of
suffering and pain may be ultimately justifiable largely on the grounds that
it leads to a greater net ratio of happiness compared to unhappiness or pleasure compared to pain,
partially because of factors discussed above. Because of the
possibility of an afterlife, and the possibility that our planet is
untypical (being inhabited by an unusually primitive civilization),
it is entirely possible that we live in a such a universe. The
possibility of an afterlife cannot be excluded in such a discussion,
as it is a possible consequence of the existence of a deity, which is
exactly what is being debated.

We
do not know the answers to the questions listed above. So we are in
no position to judge whether our universe is inferior to some
perpetually pleasant universe that we can imagine. This is one reason
why the main argument for atheism (the argument from evil) is not
valid. Another reason the argument is not valid is that a theist can
defeat it (with great simplicity) by simply conceding the possibility
of a deity with somewhat less than infinite power.

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.